IRL Subspace Conventions

[ironbuket]

I found info from the first ever Subspace convention on an old hard drive a few years back and I thought I would post details of it to the community. If you have information on any other past IRL conventions, please feel free to create a post below this and put in any detail you may have

[ironbuket]

IRL Convention 01 – October 1997 San Diego California

I originally posted a news story about this convention on a news website called Subscene in 1997 (my player name was Warhammer back then). I think maybe I ran that website, but honestly it has been so long I cant recall the details.

I had the intention of copying the story text and pasting it in here like a normal post, but the original story has some images posted with related text next to them making that difficult to pull off recreating it here

I decided instead to just post images of the original story as it appeared on the website when it was published. Sorry for the inaccessibility but I think this is the better choice

I’m also sorry for putting you through the way I wrote back then, I was young and thought it was cool at the time 😅

 

[🜲 Swift]

Doubt something like this will happen nowadays. However, I do have plans of travelling around the U.S. sometime soon - going to different drop zones, boogies et cetera if possible. Gotta get my platform out there to the masses.

[ironbuket]

10 hours ago, Swift said:

Doubt something like this will happen nowadays. However, I do have plans of travelling around the U.S. sometime soon - going to different drop zones, boogies et cetera if possible. Gotta get my platform out there to the masses.

I thought I saw someone speaking about a later meetup of players, which was why I made this generally about it rather than just the one I had details on

I don’t think many people keep the same email addresses for 30 years. Probably not even for 10 years? I still have the one I used back when the game was in Alpha. You should see the amount of junk mail I get per day 😊
I have some player email lists from 1997. I have been thinking about using it to send something out about this forum but I’m hesitant (data protection wasn’t a thing many thought of back then)

[🜲 Swift]

I've had the same email address since whenever gmail came out. No change to that whatsoever. However I did lose a couple old email accounts because they just stopped being the one available. I.e. rocketmail or one of my old hotmail accounts.

[No_Remorse]

That's a really cool story about the convention, iron... Mexico, Hooters and Titty bars, awesome lol. Also pretty cool that that some of the original SS devs were in attendance. I was only 12 back then for reference, but sounds like my kind of party!

[damageinc86]

This is wild! Thanks for posting this! I hadn't found out about the game until summer of 1998, so I wasn't into it enough to even begin to think about making any IRL meetups.  This looks like fun.  A different time.  I'd be hesitant to meet but a few people from the game nowadays.  Good lord some of the discords are unhinged lol.  There seemed to be a different vibe back then, even with the amount of shit talk.  Just feels like it was different, in a good way.  Wish I could have had this type of camaraderie early on.  Looks like a fun time actually connecting with people.  

[ironbuket]

On 12/23/2025 at 7:45 AM, damageinc86 said:

This is wild! Thanks for posting this! I hadn't found out about the game until summer of 1998, so I wasn't into it enough to even begin to think about making any IRL meetups.  This looks like fun.  A different time.  I'd be hesitant to meet but a few people from the game nowadays.  Good lord some of the discords are unhinged lol.  There seemed to be a different vibe back then, even with the amount of shit talk.  Just feels like it was different, in a good way.  Wish I could have had this type of camaraderie early on.  Looks like a fun time actually connecting with people.  

I can’t speak very much about what the scene was later on, but players were pretty crazy back then too. Very few people I played with in the early days of subspace seemed sane or stable. For a lot of people this was their first taste of competitive online gaming. Counter strike was 3-4 years away and maybe you could play Doom or Quake on your work LAN if you were lucky